


unwound

by Wayward_Eurydice



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 04:18:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8734603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wayward_Eurydice/pseuds/Wayward_Eurydice
Summary: “Because you broke her there,” was Dorian’s smooth reply, “holding things up in front of her that she couldn’t have.  When the demons cut you down, and you put up a fight, props for that, she screamed.  She lunged forward out of the ritual circle, and I had to grab her and hold her back, kicking and screaming, to keep her from ruining everything for the sake of one elf who was already dead.  And now you’ve done it again.  You’ve held something up in front of her that you’ve now decided that she can’t have.  Bravo.”When Solas brings his relationship with Nimue Lavellan to an abrupt end, her companions are not impressed.  Written for a Kink Meme fill a few years back.





	

He supposed that it was to be expected: the cold looks from Cassandra, Vivienne's mockingly raised and impeccably groomed eyebrows, Sera's outright glares.  He saw her sometimes: the view from the battlements looking out onto Sera’s favorite rooftop, drifting through the courtyard with Cole on midnight strolls, a braid of shocking white hair whipping around the edge of the war room door.  But it was obvious that for all he saw her, she did not see him; was determined not to see him.  Even when crossing paths was inevitable, when she was passing judgment in Skyhold’s massive antechamber, perched on the literal seat of the Inquisition like a bird upon a swing in a cage, and he was shadowing some dark corner, a curtain of that same bewilderingly hued hair drawn across her newly naked visage, she looked past him if her gaze ever chanced in his direction.  No; she looked through him, as if he were as incorporeal as the spirits he had once introduced her to.  
  
He supposed that he should consider himself lucky, spared the endless confrontations he might have expected.  He had expected her to dog his steps, to demand understanding at every turn, to haunt him - as if he was not already haunted by her!  Constantly; the haunting was constant.  Even now:  
  
“I’ll remember it,” Cole said, keeping time behind him as he paced through the courtyard.  
  
“Good,” said Solas testily.  “Someone should.”  If only it would not be her… if she could step back, then to the side, then forward and onward, like the dance at the Winter Palace, snowflakes wetting her hair and her lips before he covered them with his own…  He shook himself and moved on.  The books from Ostwick had not been delivered to his study, so where could they have gone… Books were all he had to distract him, now that Varric no longer invited him to play cards, nor Bull chess… Books, and Corypheus… Always Corypheus, and her, but she was the distraction but he had told her that he was her distraction.  Was that all they were to one another, distractions?  Would she believe that, if he told her, wrote it down, something concrete that she could hold—  
  
“What’s a metaphor?”  
  
Solas ran a hand over his face, but continued walking.  At least this was a typical Cole inquiry instead of… “A figure of speech.  How you of all people communicate a good deal of the time.”  
  
“She was more interested in felt.”  
  
He stopped.  Cole did not.  “I should have kept my hands to myself,” the hybrid boy murmured.  “I won’t make that mistake again.  I wouldn’t have pulled you to me.  Did you feel her?  I can feel her.  Torn up but together.  Pinned like the shiny things on red coats.  Hat was stupid; I should have known by the hat.  I didn’t know you danced.”  
  
Her heart had thrummed in curious places and he could hear them all as they moved together on that balcony to the sound of the garish band inside, and then again when they moved together in another way later, in private, her body pressed against his in a manner that propriety at the ball would not have permitted…  
  
“You ran your hands through hair, soft, winding, twisting, spider silk, wove into ropes, braids, could hang, snap, wind whistling as falling, but who would play the liar then, cocooned in blankets, wove words that cannot be unwound,” chanted Cole distantly.  “Should I cut it?  Would that make it stop hurting, stop singing?  You are no archdemon, to make me hear a Call, but I hear and I feel…"  
  
He felt his knees give out from under him, damp grass stain his shins.  “I did not want this,” he heard himself say, not a babble, not quite, not a plea, but close, “I did not ask for this.  Cole, you cannot do this.  You cannot hound me like this.”  
  
“But you told me,” was the slightly bemused reply.  “Who am I supposed to comfort, you or her?”  
  
“Her,” Solas snapped.  “Always her.  But elsewhere.  Unless you wish to drive me mad.”  
  
“No, not that.  Never that.  But you should see.  How can you promise her freedom, when you yourself are bound?”  
  
“I made a mistake.  And it seems I have made another.  And another.  It is inevitable.”  
  
When he looked up, the lost boy was gone.  But no one noticed a slight figure, hood drawn up over his graceful head, huddled in the crook of stairwell and outer wall for a short eternity.  
  


* * *

  
“You might have done better to keep her happy until you had no more need of her.”  
  
He raised his gaze but did not lift his head from the books, finally found stolen in their oilcloth packaging and tossed into the privy.  A certain elf’s doing, but not… He swallowed hard, and knew that such childish tricks were beyond his… Inquisitor.  Because that was what she was to him now.  “Disappointed?”  
  
The “First Enchanter” prowled his study like the dragon her proud henin mimicked, turning up a nose at the frescoes splayed across the walls, no doubt thinking them amateurish.  “A bit, yes,” she admitted.  “I had been under the impression that you knew the way this game is played.”  
  
“Games are for children and…”  His lip curled.  “Other sorts of children.  Was there something you wanted, or have you come here to gloat?”  
  
“I do not trust my correspondence to more intermediaries than I can help,” Vivienne replied with a smile.  “What you call gloating is just a perk, darling.  Although I was wondering how you were holding up.  Well, it would seem.”  
  
“I’m sure Leliana is waiting for you with bated breath.”  
  
“Whoever said that our spymaster is the one I was looking to see?”  Her eyes regarded him coolly when he finally looked completely up in surprise.  “I normally would tell you not to flatter yourself, but as circumstances are…”  
  
“What is it?”  It could not… His throat closed up.  She would not have done anything foolish.  
  
“A warning.”  
  
“Call it what it is.  A favor.  You always want something.”  
  
“Everyone wants something.  Sera wants something with her petty pranks and hijinks; our masquerading Grey Warden with his hunched shoulders and repentant mannerisms.  You wanted something when you broke her heart, like it or not.”  
  
“I was trying to protect her!” Solas roared: the first time he had lost his temper in a long, long time.  “I am trying to protect her!  I wouldn’t be surprised if that is beyond the comprehension of a painted shrew who trades sexual favors with men in high places for power.”  
  
There was a tangible beat before the First Enchanter shrugged, dark eyes cold and clear.  “I am what I am,” she said simply, “as you are what you are.  There’s no avoiding it, dear.  And it’s an old trick, to break a woman’s heart in the name of her own protection.  I would not try it often.  But I suppose you judged our sweet Nimue to be naive enough to believe a rake’s gambit.”  
  
His fingers curled over the pages of the open book, soft parchment yielding to his neatly trimmed nails and crumpling between his joints.  “Speak your warning and get out.  Or just get out.”  
  
“You should be grateful, apostate.  It was not my doing, I’ll absolve myself instantly, but I did catch wind of it while I could still stop it.  I beg your forgiveness.  I hope you aren’t terribly allergic.”  
  
Vivienne swept out of the room in a cloud of ivory and heather grey before he could get another word out, the door swinging sharply shut behind her.  Solas’s eyes narrowed.  Clearly whatever she had been ‘warning’ him about was not that way, or she would have taken another path.  So that left…  
  
He looked down at the pages still clenched in a tightly wound fist and sighed, prying his own fingers apart and smoothing the wounded parchment.  He closed the book, and moved toward the other door, the one that led to his own personal quarters.  Once, it had been all but blocked with rubble and collapsed beams and when she had demanded upon inspecting his chamber, he had gallantly lifted her into his arms and carried her over the hazards.  She had all but giggled, and then rubbed her nose in the V of his shirt.  The shock of contact had almost made him drop her.  
  
Now the way was clear, but his steps were twice as heavy.  He heard the buzzing before he reached for the handle, noticing that the lock was noticeably mangled.  He creaked the door open, and instantly remembered the mission she had sent Commander Cullen on all those months ago, the report she had tossed onto the rough wooden table in the house in Haven he had chosen to inhabit.  She had covered her mouth with the back of her hand as he read, the corners of his own mouth twitching.  
  
“Bees.  Of course it would be bees.”  
  


* * *

  
He gave the buzzing insects an hour to clear out.  
  
Slightly stung and still catching himself swatting out of pure paranoia, Solas stormed across the courtyard toward the tavern.  “Sera!” he shouted as the door swung shut behind him, shutting out the last of the fading light.  “Sera!  Where is that cretin?  Sera!”  
  
The room was all but empty, which he supposed he should count himself fortunate for.  He was certainly making a spectacle of himself.  Even as the hours of afternoon quickly made their exit, the nightlife had not yet picked up.  The bar top was bare of patrons; he caught his gaze drawn to the glimmering bottles stacked behind the tender and his raised eyebrows.  There had been a time when he would have drunk this madness down, indeed there had been, but it had been such a long time ago…  Yet he had all but collapsed under Cole’s unknowing scrutiny and shouted himself hoarse at the first enchanter.  It seemed that this was a day for old habits resurgent, if there ever was one.  
  
“That cretin is probably making herself scarce,” said a familiar, wry voice, “if she has any sense of what’s good for her.  Which she probably doesn’t.  So shout away.  She’ll probably come running.”  
  
He found Varric sitting at the table closest to the crackling fire.  The dwarf did not invite him to sit, so Solas, with manners that seemed increasingly outdated by the minute, did not.  Instead, he found himself thinking of when that cavern in the desert had collapsed, cleaving their party in two.  He remembered taking her confession as tenderly as any chantry priest, her voice, usually as confident as her smile and as crystal clear as her eyes, trembling at the memory of falling into a shemlen’s pit trap as a child wandering in the woods, of darkness unescapable.  He had built her a fire to ward away the shadows they could escape… and then had ignored those they could not, at least for a little while, at least until Cassandra and Blackwall had found a way down to them with a stolen ladder.  But until then they had made use of the stolen moments catastrophe had gifted them, and the fire had burned brighter and traveled the entire spectrum of color as he laid her down on their cloaks spread across the sand…  
  
It was catastrophe that they had to thank for this entire affair, that hole in the sky and his own roundabout part in wreaking it, and he should not be grateful.  But why did he think of this now?  Why must he think of this now?  
  
“Cole is hiding here, isn’t he?  From me.  You must be pleased.”  
  
Varric shrugged, but did not conceal his smile.  “Prepared yet to yield the field to myself and Mama Bianca?”  
  
“I’m surprised you still cling to that name, to that memory, given all that has transpired.”  
  
“We can’t all have your talent for moving on, Chuckles.”  
  
Solas felt his shoulders roll inward and a bitter smile twist upon his lips.  “I deserve that.  Probably.”  
  
“But not the bees,” Varric agreed.  “Probably.”  
  
“You seem more forgiving than the majority,” he observed.  “I even had the honor of a visit from Vivienne earlier today.”  
  
The rogue’s smile turned sour.  “Don’t mistake apathy for forgiveness,” he told him.  “After Kirkwall went to pieces, I made the executive decision not to care about my friends’ poor choices in romance.  You still rank higher than Anders, that’s for sure.”  
  
“That’s not high praise.”  
  
“No,” Varric agreed.  “It’s not.”  
  
He didn’t know what to say, or to do.  Still, Varric had not invited him to sit and, instead, was looking rather much like he wished Solas elsewhere, anywhere else.  So Solas inclined his head an increment and said, “Enjoy your evening.  If Sera wishes to make further mischief, it seems there is little I can do to stop her.  Children.”  
  
“Chuckles,” said Varric and Solas waited.  The rogue sighed heavily.  “Your timing was shit.  You know that, right?”  
  
“My timing was always shit, my friend,” was the enigmatic reply before he made his exit with another slight nod.  Still, he wondered at Varric’s uncharacteristic inhospitality as he climbed up toward the keep.  At least until he saw Blackwall, Cassandra, and Cullen stroll laughingly through the twilight on their way to the same tavern.  
  
It was their old Wicked Grace night.  Of course.  How could he be so stupid?  
  


* * *

  
They were waiting for him.  Once again, it seemed that his timing was inevitably shit.  
  
Dorian was perusing a particularly priceless tome when Solas entered his solarium, his leather boots scuffing up the sedan as he sprawled across the cushions with his feet kicked up.  “And here I was hoping for dirty spells,” the Tevinter mage, not magister, drawled, dangling the volume length-wise by the cover and letting the pages drop against each other.  “You really are a disappointment, Solas.”  
  
“My most sincere apologies,” he returned dryly.  “I’ll strive to do ever so better in the future.  You’re right: Corypheus’s pique must stem from nothing less than a lack of sexual satisfaction.  Would you like to volunteer your services?  It would be most brave."  
  
Still, despite his bravado, he wondered actively how he could avoid another stern talking-to just before the door abruptly slammed shut behind him, seemingly of its own accord.  
  
“Brave, maybe,” said the Iron Bull.  Solas turned about to find the imposing qunari mercenary behind him, one meaty hand pressed against the firmly closed door.  “But impressively stupid.  Everyone knows I don’t like to share after a point.”  
  
“Oh, don’t be so hard on the poor man,” Dorian replied lazily.  “It’s not the worst idea he’s had in a while.”  
  
Solas felt his gaze flick between the two of them and wondered if Leliana was still in the rookery.  “Shouldn’t the two of you be with Varric,” he inquired cautiously, “cheating the commander out of his knickers?  Again.”  
  
“Always good fun,” said the Bull, “but Dorian here decided we needed to make a detour first.”  
  
The mage in question tossed the priceless book to the Bull.  The Bull tossed it over one shoulder; Solas tried not to wince.  Dorian did wince, but then swung his legs off of the edge of the divan and clapped his palms together.  “Right.  So, I heard the strangest thing, Solas.  You doubted that the inquisitor and I traveled not through the Fade, but through the very fabric of time itself to a future reprehensible to all involved -save Corypehus, who might have been having some fun on the side.  But more than that: you weren’t even the least bit curious about what that future entailed, and how our dear inquisitor handled it.”  
  
“What are you going on about?”  
  
“I’m just surprised at you,” replied Dorian, twisting the ends of his mustache.  “Such disinterest seems to go against your special and unique snowflake status of endless curiosity.  So I thought I would take it upon myself to tell you all about it.”  
  
“I’m sure it’s a fascinating tale, but I have many things to get through tonight.”  He glanced at the door into the antechamber, but the Bull appeared to be leaning rather solidly against it, raising one visible eyebrow at the elf’s apparent interest.  Solas looked the other way, to his own chamber, but—  
  
“I wouldn’t go that way,” said Dorian with a yawn.  “I heard someone unleashed several jars of bees over there.  Funny, that.”  
  
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to tell me all about,” Solas said firmly.  “I know the better part of it, despite what you’ve heard.”  
  
Dorian laced his long fingers together.  “But I thought you’d like to hear all about your own personal part in this future.”  
  
"No.”  He’d take his chance instead with the rookery, even if he had an unpleasant vision of himself being dragged back down the stairs heels first by the Bull.  
  
“You were dying,” Dorian’s voice called him back.  “You said so yourself.  You were dying, in a cell.”  He paused.  “Alone.”  
  
His throat closed in and twisted up upon itself.  The fool Tevinter did not know, could not know, and yet…  
  
“You’d ingested lyrium one way or another,” he continued, “the red kind.  Mind, it was everywhere so I think we all got a good whiff at some point.  Anyway, you were dying and she… Nimue, she…  Oh, how do I put this…?”  
  
“She went apeshit,” said the Iron Bull and Dorian snapped his fingers.  
  
“Oh, don’t spoil it!  Yes, she went… what he said.  But that was later; at first, she just kind of choked up.  Puppy dog eyes, her hands all over your shoulders, your face, as if she was trying to make certain that you were there, even if you were dying.  She wasn’t nearly so touchy-feely with Cassandra, let me tell you.  It was actually kind of cute, if it wasn’t so miserably tragic.”  
  
“That’s not even the important part,” the Bull reminded Dorian and Solas wondered what they seemed to think could make this even more agonizing than it already was.  
  
“Hmm, yes, the final stand,” Dorian looked thoughtful.  “Well, we were all trapped, pretty much: demons hammering at the door, a risky ritual that needed more time, thrilling stuff.  Leliana, Cassie, and you volunteered to hold the door while she and I went back and—“  
  
“And that’s when she went apeshit,” the Iron Bull interrupted triumphantly.  
  
Dorian sighed.  “Yes.  That’s when she went apeshit.  She refused, you see; she swore up and down that she wouldn’t let you die, not in this timeline or another… and you were so sweet.  She had her little hands all bunched up in your collar and you so very gently took her wrists and made her let go.  She had to let go, you said… but then you kissed her and I’m not sure what that was supposed to accomplish.”  
  
He felt his eyes widen.  So the first move, the first kiss, it had been his… somehow, it had been his.  So he had known, at Redcliffe.  He had always told himself that it had been her initiative that had made him see… but he had known.  
  
“Seems counterproductive from where I’m standing,” rumbled the Bull.  “If he wanted her to leave him behind…”  
  
“It’s the stuff of romance!” exclaimed Dorian, shooting his sometime lover a reproving look.  
  
“I’ll leave that to our friend Varric.”  
  
“Why are you telling me this?” Solas demanded, although it came out hoarse, pained.  
  
“Because you broke her there,” was Dorian’s smooth reply, “holding things up in front of her that she couldn’t have.  When the demons cut you down, and you put up a fight, props for that, she screamed.  She lunged forward out of the ritual circle, and I had to grab her and hold her back, kicking and screaming, to keep her from ruining everything for the sake of one elf who was already dead.  And now you’ve done it again.  You’ve held something up in front of her that you’ve now decided that she can’t have.  Bravo.”  
  
Solas was silent.  What could he say?  What was there to say?  Finally, he turned to the Iron Bull and asked, “So what are you here for?  Do you have some other narrative of how I ruined her life even more than I already knew?”  
  
The mercenary chuckled: low, soft, and dangerous.  “She’s like my little sister,” he said, disarmingly blithe.  “I’d wager that somewhere in that little head of yours all crammed up in the Fade that you’ve figured out what big brothers do to the fuckers who break their little sisters’ hearts.”  
  
“Don’t reach for that,” said Dorian quietly, calmly when Solas started to channel.  “Why do you think I’ve blathered on and on for so long?  Other than trying to surpass Varric as a storyteller.  I think I’m getting quite good.”  
  
His nostrils flared in a snarl at this intangible albeit crippling blow.  “I think you’re having fun,” he snapped without even looking at Dorian.  “Tell me: does bullying the elven apostate bring out the magister in you?”  
  
Splintering pain crackled across his jaw, spiderwebbing out along his nose and cheekbone from the point of impact.  He felt his neck snap left with the blow as the Iron Bull drew back.  “There,” said the qunari, lightly bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet.  “I’ve answered my own—“  
  
His fist slammed into the underside of the Bull’s jaw in a deft uppercut that did little more than make the giant of a soldier blink.  In contrast, Solas shook out his knuckles, wincing.  It was like punching the wall.  
  
“Alright, pajama elf.”  He cracked his neck one way, then the other before winding up his fists again.  "Let’s dance.”  
  
“I don’t want to fight.”  
  
“Good.  This will go faster then.  And I never thought you were good enough for her anyway.”  
  
“Odd.  She seemed to think the same about you.  I heard you asked her if she wanted to ride the—“  
  
Words and breath fled his throat as the Bull slammed him into the opposite wall, a rib or two cracking, his feet dangling some inches off of the floor, each of the mercenary’s meaty hands pinning his upper arms against painted plaster.  Even so, he managed to turn his head to smirk at Dorian.  “Didn’t you know?”  
  
“Well, I’m not totally surprised,” said the Tevinter mage baldly as a fist cracked across the other side of Solas’s face.  He felt his lower lip split at the seam.  “Our Bull isn’t exactly discriminating and she is a pretty little thing.  But I saw you all but burn holes in the back of Cullen’s curly head when he offered her his arm up the stairs.  A bit possessive, aren’t you, for one who has already quit the field?”  
  
“I had no choice!” he protested, but all that did was provoke the Bull to slam his forehead against Solas’s own.  Stars spun out of their constellations with the blow.  
  
“Shit, you didn’t,” he grunted as the elven mage’s world spun on and on.  “It’s not even like you made a mistake, asshole.  You fucking led her on.”  
  
“She would not be dissuaded,” he managed, and the Bull tossed him against the stone floor like a rag doll.  
  
“You want a go?” the mercenary asked Dorian.  
  
“How sweet of you,” was the response, “yet I’m not quite getting as much fun out of this as I anticipated.  Pity.”  
  
“True pity that you couldn’t come to this revelation sooner,” Solas gasped and the Bull kicked him in the side.  He felt his head drop down to meet the floor; the stone was cool and comforting.  “Really, I expected better of you, Dorian,” he murmured dazedly into the floor.  “The Bull, however, as a mindless, soulless drone, I can never be disappointed in.”  
  
The mindless, soulless drone in question hauled the elf up by the front of his robes so that his feet once again dangled.  “There are a few dozen bees in the other room,” Solas gasped.  “I could introduce you.  I think you’d all get on swimmingly.”  
  
The Bull’s one remaining eye narrowed and Solas was beginning to think he might as well kiss the rest of his undamaged ribs goodbye when—  
  
“What is the meaning of this?”  
  
Cassandra stormed forward onto the scene, amber eyes aflame.  Dorian snapped to attention, all but leaping to his feet, and the Iron Bull was quick to drop Solas like a guilty dog with a stolen steak.  Even with the sharp pain of impact, the elf felt a hazy sense of relief and intermingled gratitude.  His blood might just not end up splattered all over his carefully depicted murals after all.  
  
“What is the meaning of this?” the Seeker demanded once more.  Her face made Solas wonder how bad he really looked.  He raised fingers up to his brow, and they came away sticky with blood.  Oh.  That bad.  
  
“Oh, come on, Seeker,” said the Iron Bull.  “You can’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”  
  
“Thought about it, perhaps,” Cassandra admitted and Solas closed his eyes to keep anyone from seeing their roll.  That, and also because the room was seemed to be threatening to collapse on top of him.  “Acting on a sociopathic impulse is another matter entirely.”  
  
“Can the woman who regularly severs bandits’ spinal cords without a second thought really afford to throw that term around?”  
  
“Watch it, mage,” was the terse reply.  “I didn’t hear you telling him to stop.”  
  
“I didn’t.”  Dorian rolled back his shoulders and yawned.  “You’ve seen how she’s been ever since, throwing herself at every hostile anything from dog to dragon.”  Solas’s skin crawled at the image.  He hadn’t known; how could he?  She never took him anywhere with her now.    
  
Dorian continued.  "How many cuts have I healed, how many bruises have you taken for her?  Don’t you think it’s about time he’s felt a few of them for himself?”  
  
“More,” said Cassandra, her lip curling, “than you know.  But that does not justify… this!  We need him.”  
  
“Who needs him?” the Bull demanded.  “She sure as hell doesn’t.  I’ve seen how the commander and the wannabe warden look at her.”  And that made Solas’s skin crawl almost as much as the dogs and dragons remark.  If not more.  
  
“We need him,” she repeated, “for Corypheus.  You can play up your petty revenge all you like, but I would rather take vengeance for Haven.  For the world.  And we need him for that.”  
  
Dorian and the Iron Bull exchanged sulky looks.  With a heavy sigh, Cassandra leaned forward and picked Solas up off of the floor with about as much reluctance as he imagined she could manage.  And that annoyed him as much as anything else.  He hated nothing more than to be patronized; Dorian and the Bull’s naked anger suited him better than barely masked tolerance.  So when he opened his mouth to give thanks for her intervention as they looked at each other face to face, he squinting, she surly, the words dripped with smooth sarcasm.  
  
“I am ever so grateful, Seeker, that you have seen fit to lower yourself to my aid.  Truly, you are a compliment to your Order.”  
  
There was barely a minute's opportunity to glimpse Cassandra’s scowl before her gauntleted fist drove sharply into his nose and he hit the floor again, bloody and broken.  But for just a moment, as his vision faded out sideways as he lay there, cheek hot and sticky against the flagstones, he thought he saw a slim figure with a shock of snow-white hair in the open doorway and he thought he might have heard a strangled scream.  But he couldn’t be sure as he slumped into unconsciousness.  He could never be sure.  
  
“Stop it!”  Nimue Lavellan screamed when she saw Solas hit the flagstoned floor.  Cassandra, Dorian, and the Iron Bull turned in shock at the sound, but her onetime lover did not move at all.  “Stop it, all of you!” she shouted again, storming forward, eyes burning with anger.  
  
“Inquisitor…” Cassandra started, but Lavellan didn’t let her continue.  
  
“What did you do to him?” she demanded, her nose turned up and inches from the Seeker's chin, her brow knotted in fury.  “Don’t answer that; I saw you!”  
  
“Once!” the older woman protested.  “I did not mean to… They were already… I stopped them.”  
  
“We’ll just be going now,” said Dorian, edging toward the door but it was far too late for that as the petite elven mage rounded on him and the Bull.  
  
“I can’t believe you; the both of you!” she railed at them between tears.  “What was this supposed to accomplish?  Was this supposed to make me feel better?  Does it look like this makes me feel better?”  
  
“He’s a jerk, boss,” the Bull started to say but she would have none of it.  
  
“And I’m a big girl,” she snapped.  “I can handle myself.  I don’t need you beating the jerk who left me to death on my behalf.”  She glared at Dorian again.  “You think I don’t feel the wards?  I imagine they took some time to set up.  That’s a dirty trick that you and Bull played, doing that.”  
  
The Tevinter mage hung his head as Lavellan looked to them all once more.  “What is wrong with all of you?” she demanded, her voice cracking.  The Iron Bull opened his mouth, and Lavellan shook her hands at him.  “Don’t answer that.  I don’t want to hear it.  Get out, all of you, out!”  
  
“Inquisitor?” Cassandra stalled as Dorian and the Bull raced to the door.  
  
There was an empty bottle of cloudy green glass perched upon the desk.  Lavellan didn’t even notice its presence until her fingers were curled around its neck for the split second before it shattered against the wall just inches from the Seeker’s left ear.  
  
“I said out!” she screamed and Cassandra fled.  
  
The door swung behind her, but did not close.  Lavellan didn’t notice.  Lavellan didn’t look.  Her feet couldn’t move fast enough to cover the space between her and a crumpled, unmoving Solas to her satisfaction.  Dropping to her knees beside him, she reached out tentatively -tentatively; she who had seen every inch of him and he of her! -and touched the blood seeping from his split lip and bloody nose.  
  
“I didn’t want this,” she whispered.  “I didn’t ask for this.  I never would have asked for this.  Solas, you bastard, wake up.”  She tried to draw from her own power, but the words that bloody smug bastard Dorian had set up worked as well on her than they had on him.  Her breath choked at the utter sense of helplessness that overwhelmed her; that he was right here, broken and bleeding, and she could do nothing.  She touched his chest, warm beneath her fingertips, and felt the rounded sharps of broken ribs and screamed again, “Josephine!  Varric!  Vivienne!  Anyone!”  
  
“He’s bleeding,” said a familiar voice, as ghostly and soft as a cool kiss one had only dreamed of.  There had been a time that such ghostly embraces had been all that she and her lover had been able to share.    
  
Cole’s wide-brimmed hat cast shadows in the torchlight as he crouched beside her, beside her and Solas’s motionless body gathered half-way into her lap; she couldn’t even remember pulling him into her arms, but it seemed she had and now his blood was staining her breeches.  
  
“He bleeds from new wounds inflicted and old wounds reopened all at once,” continued the spirit-boy, his voice melodically comforting.  “They did this to him.  I don’t like them so much anymore.”  
  
His own powers seemed unaffected by Dorian’s wards, Lavellan would reflect later, but for now there were more pressing issues.  “Cole, you have to help me,” she whispered.  She looked back at an empty doorway.  “No one else is going to help me.”  
  
“Help,” he repeated and then nodded.  “I can do that.”  
  
The atrium door had swung shut again in the time it took Nimue Lavellan and Cole to pull Solas up between them.  His smooth head lulled against her shoulder as it often had in stolen moments of sleep, as it might have in future moments of sleep that he in turn had stolen from her, with his insistence of unselfishness.  But she refused to drop him, even if he was getting blood all over her favorite shirt with the carved ironwood buttons on the collar.  She was not that cruel, even if his cruel to be kind routine had been extremely wearing on the ears.  And the heart.  
  
“Not that way,” Cole whispered when she looked to the path to Solas’s personal chamber.  “That way has bees.  Never liked him anyway, serves his elven glory right in the—"  
  
“That’s enough, Cole,” Lavellan hissed in return, making a mental note to restrict Sera’s access to jars of bees in future requisitions, a request Commander Cullen would only be too glad to honor.  She heaved Solas a little higher against her shoulder, tried not to cringe at his half-uttered groan of pain at the movement.  Tried not to…  
  
“Don’t try to make me feel anything, you selfishly unselfish--”  
  
“That’s enough,” she said again, a little more sharply than intended.  “We’ll go the other way.”  
  
She hooked the toe of her boot around the corner to the other door and kicked it open; it banged against the wall more loudly than intended; nothing was going intended today.  A point that was made even more when Josephine squawked in surprise on the other side and dropped her clipboard.  
  
“Inquisitor!” she exclaimed.  “What— Oh my!”  
  
“Empty guest chamber,” Lavellan said solidly.  “Now.”  
  
“Empty guest chamber…” Josephine repeated, her dark eyes traveling the length of Solas’s beaten body.  “There… there are no empty guest chambers, what with the day in court tomorrow and… Has there been an intruder?  Should I call a crew to come in and clean?  What is… Why not his own chamber?”  
  
“Bees,” explained Cole distantly, more fascinated by the slow trail of blood running down Solas’s nose and plopping onto the floor.  
  
“And wards,” said Lavellan crisply.  “Vivienne; you need to get me Vivienne and I’ll set him up in my room if there is nowhere else.”  
  
“Of course, I’ll fetch Madame de Fer myself, but it’s not exactly seemly for you to be seen—“  
  
“And how exactly is it more seemly for him to be left bleeding on the floor?” she snapped and Josephine shut up and scooped up her clipboard.  Which was exactly what Lavellan wanted.  
  
Cole watched Josephine scuttle away in a flutter of golden ruffles and sharply barking orders.  With the toe of his shoe, he nudged at the candle the advisor had left behind, snuffed out the flame, and rubbed at the congealed wax.  “She didn’t know,” he remarked idly.  “She knew, but she didn’t.  She was not a member of this conspiracy.”  
  
“There was no conspiracy,” Lavellan muttered and motioned for them to start moving toward the quiet little door that wound up to her personal chambers.  “Just a couple of idiots thinking that cracking his skull a few times would make me feel better.”  
  
“And the bees.”  
  
“Bees don’t have the mental capacity to willingly involve themselves in a conspiracy, even if there was one.  And there wasn’t one.”  
  
“All thinking it, none speaking it.”  
  
“We are the Inquisition, not the Ben-Hassrath.”  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
Solas murmured something against her shoulder; “Abelas,” she thought she heard him whisper, but when she reached out to him with magic no longer constrained by Dorian’s wards, he had already passed back into slumber.  
  
“Abelas,” she repeated then shook her head.  “You’d better be, harellan, making me feel...”  
  
“See?” Cole said triumphantly.  “You too.  And the bees.”  
  


* * *

  
They would have half-carried half-dragged him all the way up the countless steps to her chamber, but Cullen himself caught up to them half-way up the stairs along with one of his assistants.  The commander’s handsome face blanched at the sight, but whether it was Solas unconscious or Lavellan all but murderous that distressed him more, it could not be said.    
  
And she was feeling a little murderous at the moment; all those steps they had taken, there had been little running through her mind other than how best to take her vengeance on those who had wronged her companion and onetime lover, and little said other than Cole repeating those thoughts back to her.  Even now, she flinched back and bared her teeth when the commander moved to relieve her of her burden.  
  
“Easy there,” said Cullen carefully, gently.  “I’m not going to take him away from you for good, just to get him the rest of the way to bed.  Can you feel your shoulder shaking?  That’s not good.  Let me help.”  
  
She could feel the muscles in her shoulder, the sinews in her neck and arm all trembling under this exertion.  “Don’t drop him,” she told Cullen, trying to keep her voice from shaking like her body.  
  
“Believe me,” said the commander.  “That is the last thing I want to do.”  
  
Cole made a noise of disbelief as Cullen took Lavellan’s burden from her, but they supported Solas between the two of them.  “He is one of this conspiracy,” the lost boy hissed at Lavellan as they started up the stairs again.  
  
“Everyone is mad at him, and we are not,” she added firmly, “the Ben-Hassrath.”  
  
Still, her fingertips did not stray far from the small of Solas’s lifeless back as she closely trailed them up the stairs, just in case.  
  
The perimeter of her bedchamber breached, Cullen looked between bed and chaise then back to her for an opinion.  Lavellan pointed to the bed; at his raised eyebrow, she shrugged.  She turned aside as though she truly did not care and then remarked idly that the sheets would wash clean easier than furniture.  She heard the mattress creak with its new burden, a weight it had born often in recent memory, and then a chair whispered a response.  Cole; she knew that Cole would linger a thousand years if she did not send him away.  
  
“You shouldn’t stay,” she told the spirit-made-flesh.  “This is not a pain you can heal,” she added, borrowing sentiments she had heard Solas speak before.  “it would only frustrate you.  Vivienne will be here any moment, with her potions and books.”  
  
“I want to help,” said Cole stubbornly.  
  
“As do I,” said Cullen quietly, just to her.  
  
She looked sadly up at her commander: a stalwart soul she knew she could trust to take a thousand arrows for her, not a softly smiling trickster who could be planning a murder and you would never see it in his face.  Cullen placed a warm hand upon her shoulder; she turned at the touch like a flower to the sun, covered his fingers with her own, and then gently lifted his hand and set it aside.  
  
“This is not a pain you can heal either,” she told him and then looked away again, this time to the setting sun painting watercolor frescoes across the walls.  
  
She felt the room empty rather than watched it.  Cullen left by one door; Cole by another, less tangible one.  Lavellan waited a short moment for the sun to disappear behind the mountain, and only then did she drag up a chair to Solas’s bedside.  His pale blue eyes were just barely closed; his forehead was smooth of strain.  If not for the dried blood crackled across his face, he might have been peacefully asleep.  It occurred to her that she had never watched him sleep in an actual bed; never seen him wake up; he had always stolen away before he could cause a scandal.  It would destroy her holy reputation, he had routinely claimed, if they knew that her bed was cohabited by an elven apostate.  
  
“Well, now they know,” she whispered.    
  
She thought about reaching out, wiping the blood from his brow, but the easy intimacy that they had once had seemed to be stolen from her; the last of it put into the unconscious physicality of pulling his head into her lap back in his solarium.  Now, reaching out those few inches felt like a dreadful taboo.  Yet another thing stolen.  
  
“You took so many things,” she murmured to his expression, blank as it was in slumber, “and you left so you wouldn’t take anymore.  But the damage is done.  The least you could have done would have been to be generous in the time we have left.”  
  
The door slammed open; Lavellan jolted to her feet as Madame de Fer made her grand entrance.  “By Andraste,” exclaimed Vivienne, surveying the scene, “darling, what did those brutes do?”  
  
Lavellan opened her mouth to explain, but the first enchanter swooped down upon her, long, tapering fingers turning her chin one way and then the other, examining her shoulders and neck for bruises.  “Oh, I hope the blood washes out,” tutted the ever fashionable Madame de Fer.  “Have you already healed up, darling?  You never seemed to have a natural talent for it, but I could imagine that physical shock might provoked something preternatural—“  
  
“Not me!” she exclaimed and pointed at the bed.  “They didn’t hurt me.  Solas.”  
  
Vivienne cast a sideways glance where she indicated, lips curling.  “Oh.  Josephine was rather hysterical.  I just assumed…  Well, that’ll be two favors he’ll owe me now.  I tried to warn him.”  
  
“Why?” she asked, outright staring.  “You hate him.”  
  
“I don’t hate anyone, darling,” replied Vivienne mildly, selecting a salve from her silk satchel.  “It would be a waste of energy I do not care to expend.  Dislike, perhaps.  Hate is another thing entirely.  We cannot afford to hate when we can help it, especially not now.”  
  
“So this is charity then?”  
  
“Hardly,” was the crisp response.  “Madame de Fer and the gift of charity; I think not.  Here.”  She tossed Lavellan the crystal vial and the younger mage just barely caught it in time.  “I’ll set the ribs, and the nose.  You can manage the rest.”  
  
“What?  I don’t—“  
  
She was silenced by Vivienne’s wagging finger.  The enchanter took a deep breath in, closed her eyes, and smiled at the sound that made Lavellan shriek as bones cracked back into place.  Still deep in slumber, Solas uttered a deep groan of agony; his former lover lunged forward and cupped his cheek in her hand by reflex.    
  
Vivienne smiled at the sight before moving to make her exit.  “See?” she called over one shoulder before the door shut behind her.  
  
Lavellan didn’t know whether to thank the enchanter or curse her name as the sound of her exit echoed through the chamber, so she did neither.  The wind howled against the terrace as if to answer for her, so the unwilling inquisitor strode forcefully across the space to yank the screens of leaded glass together as if in high hopes that the gesture could put up barriers in more ways than one, more places than the most obvious and physical.  But then she rotated slowly upon the balls of her feet and realized grimly that she had in fact done little else save shut herself up with the very entity she had so desired to shut out entirely.  
  
Her eyes roamed of their own accord, her mind quite unwilling.  Solas was a landscape she knew better than the forests of her clan, but one that had turned dark and forbidding in recent times.  The softly rounded shape of his head, the tightly folded corners of his closed eyes, the bow of his lips and the cutting line of his nose… she knew them all quite well.  His unmarked face had both frightened and intrigued her at first sight… but now she knew why he would have never wished for the ink of her people spiraling out against his skin.  The memory of the revelation still made her shudder yet.  But all across his skin bled stains of another sort: garish green and purpling bruises fading into black and all over that a crackled patina of browning blood.  Marks of violence enacted on her behalf… she could not touch it, but she could not leave it be all at the same.  
  
“If I can do this,” she said aloud to a world that did not answer.  “If I can do this and not feel a thing, I’ll know that it’s over.  I’ll be alright.  I’ll be free.”  
  
It was with that resolve that she fetched the cloth and bowl of clean water from across the room and marched back to the bedside, perching on the edge of the bed.  She uncorked Vivienne’s offered vial and inhaled: its contents were clearly a pungent distillation of elfroot and other healing herbs.  Pressing the stopper back into place, she set the potion to one side and dunked the clean cloth into the basin.  
  
It took all of her self-control to draw the damp length of linen across Solas’s forehead, pulling away the caked residue of the beating he had taken with it.  She tended to the split skin above his right eye first, wiping away the blood before taking the crystal vial and dabbing a drop of its contents across the wound with a fingertip.  His head turned and his hand twitched at the contact, and Lavellan drew quickly away, but when that proved to be the extent of his reaction, she sighed at her own childish anxiety and dunked the cloth back into the water.  
  
But it seemed that she had only been lulled into a false sense of security, for when she started to dab about his nose and where his lip had been split clean by a punch, pale blue eyes opened and she was caught.  His lips curved into a smug smile she knew too well at the sight of her ministrations, but faded when he remembered; she saw him remember.  
  
“What is this?” Solas asked her, but his voice came out barely louder than a croak.  His hand reached up to touch the bruises at his throat, but she swatted it away.  
  
“Nimue Lavellan and the gift of charity,” she told him bluntly.  “Don’t make me take it back.”  
  
He didn’t respond, only watched her with those unsettling eyes as she squeezed the excess water from the cloth, turning the basin’s contents to a murky red.  But she didn’t stop.  If she could do this and not feel a thing…  
  
“I’m in bed,” he remarked, more of an observation than an accusation.  
  
“You were already dressed for it.”  
  
The tips of his ears turned pink.  “You heard.”  
  
“I didn’t hear anything,” she replied, totally blasé, and dropped the cloth into the basin before reaching for the vial again.  
  
She dabbed the distillation against his lower lip with a fresh swathe of linen and he didn’t stop her.  Her thumbnail grazed the concave curve beneath his mouth and she flinched: the slightest twitch of fingers and eyelashes.  She did not intend to touch him, skin on skin.  If she could do this and not feel…  
  
He saw.  “I’m in your bed,” Solas stated and it was more than an observation this time.  She shrugged; there was no denying it.  The skin between his eyebrows knotted slightly.  “Are you sure this was the best idea?"  
  
“Unless you wanted to keep bedfellows with bees, I don’t think there was much of a choice.”  She paused, drew her hand back.  “We won’t be keeping bedfellows, you and I, if that’s what you’re so concerned about.”  
  
The pain in his eyes shocked and held her all at once, like a lightning strike conjured from her staff.  She dropped the second cloth, stopped up the vial again.  He was awake; he could tend to his own wounds now.  Whatever this was between them, whatever it had been, it was all twisted up now, going one way then the other, again and again, too tangled a knot for her to untie alone, especially when he was so unwilling to work through its paces.  Her fingers went uncalled and unnoticed to her cheekbones where the vallaslin had once rested like an elaborate Orlesian mask upon her countenance.  But he noticed.  
  
“Do you regret it?” he asked her quietly.  
  
The look she shot him was totally unmoved.  “They were supposed to protect me,” Lavellan remarked idly.  “Andruil herself, guiding my steps from… wherever she went.  Silver bow drawn and notched, aiming high, protecting the forest and the halla and me all together, driving the Dread Wolf from my shadow…”  
  
He gave her such a strange look that her words faltered and drifted off into pieces.  When silence had stabbed its flag back into the space between them, he asked, “And do you feel unprotected, now that they are gone?”  
  
“Because between the Conclave, Redcliffe, Haven, and beyond it did so well.”  She laughed softly and then stopped when she saw his face.  "I was never such a foolish child,” Lavellan told him quietly, “to think that ink on my face, whatever it symbolized, was going to protect me from anything.”  
  
Solas didn’t respond.  Perhaps he truly had nothing to say, but Lavellan had long since learned that his silence did not often mean that was the case.  He might not blurt out the first thing that came to mind like Dorian -she did not want to remember how angry she was with Dorian -but that did not mean that there was nothing stewing in there.  
  
“You mentioned Redcliffe,” he finally started to say but she did not let him get further than that.  
  
“I’m not going to talk about Redcliffe with you,” Lavellan said firmly.  “You never were interested before, and I’m not going to talk about it now.  Maybe I might have before… but not now.”  
  
She had shut all of the windows and doors, but she felt a chill pass through her bones all the same at the memory.  Sliding off of the bed -her bed -she crossed toward the staircase, before his voice called her back.  
  
“The commander is a good man.”  
  
Of all of the things… She turned about on her heel and stared at him.  “Yes,” Lavellan agreed, rather hotly.  “He is.”  The door beckoned her now more than ever and she moved to heed its call.  
  
“Wait.”  Solas struggled to sit up right, and she had to bite her lip hard to keep from rushing back to him and making him rest.  “I know… I know I have no right.”  
  
“No.  You don’t.  No right at all.”  
  
“You won’t have to suffer the sight of me much longer,” said Solas and that got her attention.  “I know I have no right, but I have to ask.  Don’t.  Please.  Not until I’m gone.”  
  
Lavellan stared at him.  “My life is my own.”  
  
“As it has always been,” he agreed and then the corners of his mouth twisted.  “That is, until you decided to drink from a Well of accumulated servitude.”  
  
“Shut up!” she snapped and then stormed across the room toward him.  “You’re absolutely right: you have no right.  You, with your seemingly boundless knowledge and 'your travels in the Fade' to justify it.  Do you think I believe that?  Do you think I believed that for a second, that you just happened to know that the orb was elven, that there just happened to be an intact fortress called Skyhold up in the mountains?  The secret of the vasallin?  You are something else, hah’ren, if you think I bought any of it from the start, and you are something even more if you think you can tell me not to try to be happy with someone else.”  
  
“You aren’t happy,” he observed loftily.  “You’re leading him on.”  
  
“Like you led me on?”  
  
“I told you from the start that this would not work.  Not in the world we live in.”  
  
“So I can’t dare to care about anyone else?  You’ve ruined me?”  She tossed her head back and laughed.  “Creators, yes, you’ve ruined me.  You’ve ruined me, Solas.  Does that make you happy?”  
  
She turned to flee and thus did not see him Fade-step until he had already spun her back around.  “You know it does not make me happy,” Solas told her quietly, his hands on her shoulders, holding her fast.  “You know that none of this makes me happy.”  
  
“Have you ever been happy?” Lavellan said with a snort of disbelief.  
  
“I was happy with you,” he replied, “which should give you a sense of how difficult this is.”  
  
Gently, as hesitant as when she had first kissed him in the Fade when nothing had been real, he leaned forward and she felt the brush of his lips on her forehead.  He pulled back and, when she did not move, gently kissed her mouth: the goodbye they had never shared.  His lips tasted like blood and elfroot.  
  
“You can’t do this to me,” she said quietly when he pulled back again.  “I hate you.  I have to hate you, or I will go mad.  And I can’t finish what began at the Conclave if I go mad.”  
  
His smile was equal parts sad and understanding.  “You know nothing of madness,” he said, “until Cole has been following you about, speaking your private thoughts aloud, for two days without end.”  
  


* * *

  
Her bed still smelled like him long after he left.  Nimue Lavellan wondered if she should burn it.  
  
Instead, she burrowed under the covers and drew the sheets over her head, inhaling deeply: elfroot and salt, paint and blood, a scent as familiar and beloved as hazy blue eyes.  If she closed her eyes, she discovered, she could find her way back, as far back as she liked or as far back as she dared.  One day: this very room, this very bed, trying to banish any thought of how his breath would brush her ear when they curled around each other on a shared bedroll at camp.  One week: the hot winds of the Exalted Plains and red lyrium smashed to bits; it felt good to make the tainted song shatter like she wished she could shatter… One month: trying to crowd out all of the voices in her head, the endless chorus that she had tried desperately to drown out even as she had all but drowned in the Well of Sorrows.  So many things she wanted to banish, to exile, when once she had barely been able to bring that lightest of sentences down upon a stranger throwing dead goats onto her walls…  
  
One year, she decided, and she was back running through the forests of the northern Free Marches, not that any such boundaries mattered then to then only Nimue, First to the Keeper of Clan Lavellan and only that.  Nobody’s spy, nobody’s herald, nobody’s inquisitor.  Nobody’s lover.  She could chase her prey over the Antivan or Nevarran border and it would mean nothing to her.  
  
And that was precisely what she intended to do, this Nimue before she became Lavellan, before she had to take the name of her clan for her own, before she had to take the title of the most powerful non-national organization in Thedas as her own.  She had spotted her quarry and she would not rest until it was hers.  She had long since outstripped her friends and companions.  Diminutive Enelye and wicked-eyed Nariel were both encumbered by bows and quivers; electricity and ice that would answer her call were weightless.  She could hear them calling after her, but their voices sounded murky and far away, as though she were underwater.  
  
The forest was dark and deep, but the sunlight still twinkled through the overarching branches, as elegant as any palace’s vaulted ceilings.  It was strange to remember a time when she had never set foot in such a place, had no comparison to make.  It was stranger still to see her hair tumbling over her shoulders in golden ropes of alternating curls and braids, brushing her face and falling into her eyes with every bound and leap, every vaulted fallen tree and forded stream.  Mud and moss was everywhere, abundant and fertile, yet none of it seemed to splatter or cling to her ankles.  But none of it mattered.    
  
All that mattered was the rustle of that bush up ahead, the flash of shocking white twisting around that tree.  Nimue did not stop, did not think of anything but the chase, until moss and earth wore away to smooth stone and the vines no longer twisted around trees but pillars and statues of stone.  
  
Her bare feet scraped against the uneven flagstones but left the hardened skin unblemished and unbruised, her cheek brushed against a dangling vine of nodding roses, but none of its thorns broke her skin.  The green light of the forest lingered, but it came through only patches now, through holes in the ceiling… or the sky.  
  
And when there were no more vines twisting and winding against the stone walls, when she had gone too deep for nature’s grasp, there were instead paintings, murals of which she had never seen the like.  Gods and monsters; mirrors and wolves.  But when she reached out to touch one image, to rest her palm against the brush-stroked fur of a wolf’s shadow howling against the moon, the colors spiraled away like spooked halla.  “This isn’t real,” she whispered.  
  
“That’s a matter of debate.”  
  
She spun around, knowing the voice, and, as she did, her hair turned from gold to silver and the green light was inside of her again, burning from her palm up her arm, retracing the entire progress that the mark had made in the hours between the explosion and when she had reopened and resealed the Breach, while she had slumbered and Solas had watched her, observed her, formulating a theory that would later inspire him to snatch up her wrist and thrust both of their palms at that first meeting, at that first rift.  
  
And here he was again, the sight of him as familiar and painful as the Anchor itself.  
  
“This is an old dance, ma vhenan,” Solas told her, smiling his crooked, kind smile that she knew so well.  
  
“If this is an old dance,” she said, pacing warily at a distance from him, the old Dalish hunter and hunted not quite banished, “you’d better give me a new reason to go through the steps.  A good reason.  A damned good reason.”  
  
“I am sorry,” he replied, old words and as unsatisfying as ever.  He hung his head, his eyes hidden from her.  “Once again, this is unerringly selfish of me.  But I could not leave matters as they were between us.”  
  
“You’re not hurt,” noted Nimue, remembering.  
  
“Not in this realm.  In another, I am sound asleep on the chaise in Varric’s chamber, recovering quite well, no doubt due to your efforts.  It once was a personal fantasy of mine,” Solas admitted wryly, “waking up and seeing you wide-eyed and tending to my battle wounds.”  
  
“Didn’t look like much of a battle to me.  It didn’t seem like you were fighting back.”  She paused.  “At all.  Did you want them to kill you?”  
  
The corners of his mouth twisted.  “A more fitting punishment than you could know.  But the People need me.  You need me.”  
  
“I need you with me,” she corrected and was ashamed to hear her voice break.  “And if I cannot have that, I need to know why.”  
  
Solas turned aside, his shoulders slumping.  “You should not ask this,” he told her without looking at her.  “If you knew the answer, you would not ask this.”  
  
“But I don’t,” Nimue snapped, taking two quick steps forward and wrapping her fingers around the crook of his elbow.  She pulled him back just as she had that day on the balcony when she had told him not to go and he had claimed it would be kinder if he did.  Perhaps the same was true here, now.  But she didn’t let go.  She said, “So here I am, asking.”    
  
“Here you are,” he acknowledged, but that was not good enough.  He still would not look at her, even in the Fade where he claimed things were ‘easier’ for him, so she shook him a little.  
  
"What are you so afraid of?  What would happen to you that would be so terrible if I knew?  It cannot be worse,” she laughed then, harsh and bitter, “it cannot be worse than Blackwall’s secret identity or Varric’s old flame or Dorian’s father.  We all have secrets, Solas.  It’s only when we ignore them and they bubble up over the pot that someone gets burned.”  
  
The paintings on the walls twisted and changed in his silence, but Nimue didn’t look at them.  Finally:  “It is not my wellbeing I fear for,” Solas said slowly.  “Vhenan, it is yours.  You would not understand.  You would think yourself betrayed even more than you already do.  You would think yourself the greatest fool who ever walked Thedas and the Fade altogether.  You… You would not thank me.”  
  
He looked at her then, blue eyes unfathomable depths, boundless oceans she could not even think of trying to traverse.  But she swallowed her doubt, set her mouth into an expression he had better remember as unsurmountable stubbornness, and said, “Try me.”  
  
It was clearly the last thing he wanted her to say.  His eyes met hers again, steady, unflinching, but with no small measure of guilt.  “The orb is mine,” he said bluntly.  “The mark,” he pried her hand off of his arm and lifted it for her inspection, “is however inadvertently also mine.  The fault, vhenan, is mine and I will not ask you to save me from it.”  
  
Nimue stared at him.  It seemed she could do little else.  “What are you talking about?”  
  
Pulling away from her entirely, Solas looked to the murals on the wall, ever present, ever in motion.  “I did not mean to sleep for so long,” he said softly, and if it was a confession she did not know what of.  “I was exhausted, drained.  I knew it would take time to recover my strength, but I did not intend—”  
  
“What has that got to do with anything?”  
  
He paced back and forth, as restless and wild as the time she had come downstairs just in time to see him shatter a teacup in his anxiety over his friend, the one they had not been in time to save.  “Your people… our people,” Solas began, “they say that I fled, disappeared into some far, unreachable corner of the earth and spent ages thrilling in my so-called victory, cackling wildly in glee.”  His shoulders slumped again as he ceased his circuit.  “They are only partly wrong.”  
  
“What are you talking about?” Nimue demanded, and that made him snap.  
  
All but charging her, he snatched up her wrist again and pulled it up between them.  “Do not play the fool with me,” he snarled, blue eyes turning black and vicious.  “Never play the fool with me.  You know the story full well, First to the Keeper.  Your People, your Dalish, have a ring, do they not?  Passed down from hah’ren to da’len,” he continued and as he spoke the very ring curled like smoke around her finger until it became sylvanwood before her very eyes: hard, unyielding, and elaborately carved.  He shook her wrist.  “Don’t you?”  
  
With great effort, she twisted her arm and wrenched her wrist away.  He let her go; somehow, she knew he could have stopped her if he so desired.  Eyes flashing as hot as his, Nimue snapped, “I will not have this from you.  I am not your apprentice, to be railed at and disciplined as you might.”  
  
Head held high, she spun around and away from him, making as though to make a grand exit… although, to where, she had no idea.  But she didn’t need to.  He caught her first.  
  
She heard his sharp intake of breath, then a hissed, “No, you insisted, you demanded to know,” and then cold air rushed around her body like a mountain wind and Nimue found herself face to face with the oldest enemy of her People.  
  
In an instant, waking dream had turned to nightmare.  She threw herself backward, anywhere she could get, away from inky pitch bleeding darkness and burning red hot coals of eyes, ears flat, lips pulled back away from pointed teeth so bright they hurt without touching in a snarl.  The paint was bleeding from the walls as she toppled over into water, scrambling backward before regaining her footing.  She threw herself left, espying a darkened doorway and flung herself through it, slipping and sliding down steps and in every shadow were the same eyes, the same teeth…  
  
She was running again, but she was anything but the proud huntress of earlier dreaming.  One dark chamber opened onto another like one vision passing seamlessly into the next and all the shadows were laughing at her, all but the one in heavy and hot pursuit.  But the chase was inevitable; she knew the steps of this dance.  
  
Nimue Lavellan didn’t scream when the wolf finally caught her clothing with its teeth and dragged her down to a damp stone floor; she refused to.  But she twisted her face away as it stood over her, panting in triumph even as she heaved her defeat in heavy breaths.  Her neck was bared; there was no saving it, no matter which way she twisted, how she tucked her chin this way or that.  The thing could take her head clean off its shoulders if it so desired… but if she screwed her eyes up shut tight and did not think, it was not unbearably unpleasant.  She could close her eyes and pretend again, pretend that its breath was not hot and humid against her face, its teeth inches from her throat but never quite making contact…  In fact, it wasn’t doing much of anything.  
  
She opened her eyes and found herself locked staring into the wolf’s —that’s what it was, of course, just like all of the carved idols at the corners of her clan’s campsites.  Without looking away, she took a deep breath, steadying herself even as its paws moved onto her shoulders, steadying her.  For a brief moment, she thought she saw something else in its crimson eyes, something familiar, something…  
  
“Solas?” she whispered, and everything changed again when next she blinked.  
  
Suddenly, it was her onetime lover’s hands on her shoulders, his legs straddling her waist, his eyes on her face.  And the look on his face was as horrified as any she might have shown the Dread Wolf.  
  
Scrambling off of her, he would not meet her eyes.  “Forgive me,” he managed, struggling between breaths.  “I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean…”  
  
She sat up slowly, testing herself, watching him as he curled into himself, pressed his head between his hands.  “Solas?” she said again and was relieved when she caught a glimpse of his hazy blue eyes peering at her through the gloom.  She took a deep breath.  “Solas, you can tell me.  If Fen’Harel has… taken you, as Mythal did that witch…”  
  
His grim laughter cut her short.  “You don’t get it,” Solas observed bitterly.  “You pretty little fool, you still don’t get it.  He has not possessed me.  I am Fen’Harel.”  
  
Understandably, there was little to be said after that revelation.  It could not be said just how long the two of them sat in silence; time passed differently in the Fade, she could never be sure.  But they waited at least until Nimue, who did not much like being called a fool, even a pretty one, said, “I don’t see who you think you are, calling me the fool when you’re the one who let Corypheus get ahold of your fancy god orb.”  
  
“You’re really asking me who I think I am?” was the dry response.  “I just said.  I’m Fen’Harel.  And, yes, I made a critical error.”  
  
“Clearly,” Nimue muttered.  “Why didn’t you tell me?  On the balcony, by the spring, in my bedroom; you had so many opportunities.  We could have done so many things differently.”  
  
“Like what?” Solas asked and, when she had no ready answer, laughed softly.  “I did say that things come more easily to me in the Fade.”  He leaned forward and gently brushed a finger across her cheekbone, where her vallaslin used to rest.  “And I’m not telling you, ma vhenan.  Not quite.  Not yet.”  
  
“Why?” was the only thing she could think to say.  “I could help you.”  
  
“You could try,” he allowed with a slightly fond smile.  “And it is… encouraging that you only ran away from me for a little while when you saw the truth.  But this is my path, as the inquisitor’s is yours.  I would not rescue you from it, much as I wish I could, and I cannot ask you to do the same.  You won’t remember.”  
  
“I remember plenty of things we did in the Fade,” Nimue shot back.  “You might’ve remembered that after that first kiss.”  
  
“I do remember,” Solas murmured before leaning in and kissing her deeply.  She opened her mouth to him willingly as he cupped her face in his hands.  Her eyes were closed; she didn’t see his fingertips glow as they brushed across her eyelids.  Pulling back a fraction, he whispered against her lips, “Wake up.”  
  
And Nimue Lavellan did, touching her mouth in surprise as she sat up in bed, just as she had all those months ago, and thinking of little else besides the vague resemblance of a long since remembered dream to a newly forgotten one.


End file.
